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It’s no coincidence whatsoever that Miller actively chooses to go by a name that very clearly references his Jewish upbringing and faith; his early life, prior to his breakthrough as a musician, is defined initially by the strictness with which he was brought up to adhere to his religion, and then just how spectacularly he managed to break away from it in his teens, when he dropped out of high school, began taking drugs and spent as much time as he could following the band Phish around as they toured. Once he managed to put that behind him, though, he aligned himself with a Hasidic community in New York and began to make music, releasing his first record “Shake Off the Dust...Arise” on a label specifically designed to help promote Jewish musicians.
Since then, he’s become popular in circles much wider than the niche area of the music industry that he began in, and his third record, “Youth”, was enough to see him named Best Reggae Musician by Billboard in 2006. He’s carved out something of a cult fanbase, based in part purely on his irrepressibly charismatic personality, and further boosts to his career like the scooping of the Best Documentary Feature at the 2007 Slamdance Film Festival for the movie Unsettled, in which he’s featured heavily, as well as having his track “One Day” featured in NBC advertising for the Olympic Games, have ensured that his star remains on the rise; his newest record, “Akeda”, has seen him strip back his sound to rave reviews.
In all of his studio albums, Matisyahu has made a hallmark of daring creativity, and has demonstrated a unique ability to integrate diverse musical influences into his sound. He never plays it safe. Every album is a new musical, and spiritual exploration; and because of this, he has sometimes disappointed his more genre-oriented fans who tend to pine for the "good-old-days" when he seemed to be a reggae super-star and Jewish icon. But no true artist can live in a box, any more than every fan of one period in an artist's life can follow them into the next. In the end, the artist creates for those who can hear the deeper melody, changing and evolving through each period, the same melody that haunts them and has to be delivered from within.
Matisyahu fuses the contemporary styles of reggae, rap, beatboxing, and hip-hop in general, with the more traditional vocal disciplines of jazz's scat singing and Judaism's hazzan style of songful prayer. The New York Times Kelefa Sanneh wrote that "His sound owes a lot to early dancehall reggae stars like Barrington Levy and Eek-a-Mouse."
His love for Reggae started from the fact that his mother's sister married a man from Barbados and that is where his cousins were raised. Every time he would visit, he started paying more attention to their music. That was the first time he remembered hearing reggae and liking it. After that, he got into Bob Marley. He then went to see Israel Vibration and claims that they changed his life. He fell I love with the heaviness of the music, the meditative quality, and the spirituality of the lyrics with all of the Old Testament references which to him, seemed like the full package. The Chicago Tribune's Kevin Pang described a Matisyahu performance as "soul-shaking brand of dancehall reggae, a show that captures both the jam band vibe of Phish and the ska-punk of Sublime." Coming from his Jewish background and compounding his use of the hazzan style, Matisyahu's lyrics are mostly English with more than occasional use of Hebrew and Yiddish.
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